Best of the Week- Exit Through the Gift shop

   

Throughout our course in humanities this semester, we have touched on various topics, like love and poetry and lyrical art, but one thing that really caught my attention was this movie we watched called, "Exit Through the Gift Shop".

Now I don't want to say that it fascinated only because it was a movie and not a lecture, although that was half of it... It caught my attention because this movie is about a different kind of art that we see everywhere, on trains, bridges, buildings. The movie was about graffiti.



This movie really focused on a man that goes by the name Banksy, his art work appears everywhere, yet no one has ever seen his face, not even in the movie! In the movie, his face is always blurred and his voice was changed to protect him from being arrested for vandalizing various buildings across London.

What I would like to know is, if they had found out who he was, would they really arrest him? I mean, he's practically a trademark now, they have his art on mugs and they have little souvenirs that have his name written all over it!

This is because his graffiti is art. It has powerful messages and meaning and it's all so beautifully crafted. I really enjoyed watching this film because I have always looked at graffiti as vandalism and as a crime, but now I see it differently, not all graffiti is trash, sometimes, it's just an artist trying to get his message out there and wants to show the world his talent and expression. Sometimes they just want to leave their mark on this world.

Below are various pieces of art if you are unfamiliar with Banksy.

Metacognition: the Mashup Process

Well, Our most recent project in my Humanities class was something called a "Mashup".

I've never heard of such a project until now, though many of my classmates have participated in one last year.

A Mashup is a project where you take a whole bunch of different quotes all relating to one topic, and the challenge is to make it sound like one voice in conversation.

For my mashup, I decided to do the topic of "Love" and what it means to me and all the different voices in the world who I used in part of my project. Some of the people I used ranged from William Shakespeare to Macklemore.

At first, understanding exactly what I had to do was a challenge, but once I got started it was easy to just keep going.

I really enjoyed this project because it really helped me dig deeper into my thought process about what I thought Love was to what it really meant.